


If Not Justice Then Vengeance

by ricca_riot



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, Established Relationship, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Pre-Canon, mercykill - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 12:25:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8248915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ricca_riot/pseuds/ricca_riot
Summary: The immediate aftermath of Gerard LaCroix's death is a declaration of war, or: 
Angela, Gabriel, and the words they struggle to say out loud.





	

The hours after Gerard’s death come and go in the space between heartbeats.  Talon had struck at their heart, murdered a critical member of Overwatch, and then vanished like so much smoke. Everyone had wanted to go on the raid, take part in razing their justly-sworn enemies to the ground, and it had been bitter medicine when Angela had been tasked to remain behind. 

“This is war.” Reyes snaps when she corners him in his office to argue her point. He keeps his back to her, unable to meet her eyes as he arms himself: flak jacket, shotgun, pistol, grenades. After all they’ve been through together, Angela knows his tells, the aversion to eye contact, the blanched knuckles as he tightens the straps of the jacket across his chest. The Blackwatch Commander is angry, afraid, more shaken than when they had been shot down and stranded during a supply drop in Amazonia. “We can’t all go. Someone has to keep the lights on here.”

In case we don’t come back. The phrase hangs loud in the silence as he trails off and Angela hates it, hates the cowardice behind the omission, hates the idea of staying behind when her friends and colleagues are out there putting their lives at risk, like she can’t hold her own on the front lines with them. “You will need me out there.” She hugs herself tighter against the fears that crawl down her spine and scowls. 

Reyes pauses, a lethal looking boot knife dangling between his fingers, and finally turns to face her. “You’re probably right.” He gives nothing away as he slots the knife into its ankle sheath. With a sigh he straightens, joints popping as he stretches. “But Overwatch needs you here more. We’ve talked about this.”

They have, too, though it had seemed so theoretical, before Talon had attacked, when she had sat with Jack and Gabriel and Ana and they had discussed command hierarchy. Just because she wasn’t a soldier didn’t mean she couldn’t be a leader, Jack had insisted and Ana had agreed. Battlefield tactics did not preclude her from being a strategic thinker, a strong presence at UN council meetings, a voice for change and kindness and doing the right things the right way. Winston’s species precluded him from being a formal head of their organization, Reinhardt was too polarizing, Jesse was too young, too criminal… Their rational had made sense at the time, but it had never been in the context of being left behind as the people she needed to protect went off to die. The resignation curdles in her stomach, but she wouldn’t be Angela Ziegler if she let anything so simple as nerves stop her from doing her duty.

“Try not to do anything stupid out there.” The words force themselves out past the tightness in her throat and in a fit of pique, she snatches his stupid beanie up from off the table beside her and throws it at his chest.  _ Come back to me, please _ , gets stuck in the gaping chasm left from Gerard’s death and Amelie’s disappearance, wedged tight between uncertainty and dread. 

Gabriel hears her all the same. He doesn’t smile, he rarely has, since Talon had asserted themselves as a serious threat, but some of the tightness around his eyes eases. “Yes ma’am.” Her one man army in all the trappings of battle stops, just on the inside of a professional distance away and smooths a hand from her neck, over her shoulder, down her arm and squeezes so gently it shatters her heart when he turns on his heel and leaves. No goodbyes, but those are too grim, too final, in their line of work to be mere conversational closure.

The thud of his boots fade to silence and she gives herself the count to five before acting. Overwatch operatives carve small chunks out of her every time they deploy, Gabriel’s is simply larger than most. A quiet moment is a necessity to continue on, push back the helplessness and anxiety and bolster herself with trust in her comrades. It passes and Angels smooths her hair, squares her shoulders, and gets to work. The perimeter must be secured, their situation communicated to the other watchpoints, search teams sent out to find Amelie, an autopsy to perform.  

To call the next several hours dreamlike would be so cliche, but her heart is out in the Parisian night with Jack and Ana, Gabriel and Amelie, that she moves through the compound without remembering routes walked, gives orders that echo faintly in her memory. Gerard’s autopsy, as horrible as it is, shocks her back into herself, brings her focus back to its razor edge as she tests and documents all possible outcomes, then combs through the LaCroix personal residence for any remaining evidence about Gerard’s death and Amelie’s flight. 

Somewhere along the line, she had failed them. As a doctor, as a friend, she should have seen something was wrong, that the sweet, gentle dancer wasn’t simply kidnapped for months on and and returned with nothing but a shrug and a sad smile. She could have, should have seen something amiss, done something to change this outcome. Work does nothing to ease the guilt, as irrational as it is unavoidable, and she retreats to the comforting routine of cleaning and stocking the infirmary. 

It’s not that she’s waiting up for anyone, she’s just working.  Her infirmary will need to be in top shape, bursting with supplies and sterile, able to handle any possible contingency required after the night’s mission. It’s a hollow lie, of course she’s not going to sleep until every last one of her people is back and accounted for.

* * *

 

Gabriel’s still wet from the rain, still smells like the streets of Paris, gunpowder and smoke when he pushes into her lab around four in the morning as she’s scrubbing her hands clean after her final round of triage. Her heart jumps at a quick peripheral glance and she scrubs harder as though the abrasion against her knuckles will calm the quicksilver relief his return brings. Truly, he looks like death walking, grim and silent by the door to her lab, but he is alive and she is so profoundly grateful that he’s come back at all that it’s almost enough for her to pray again. 

He waits until she turns to face him to speak. “Talon’s main base of operations is gone.” The words come out a croak, dehydration or smoke inhalation, she thinks. There is no joy in this victory. His friend, people under him are dead and if he wasn’t mourning them in his own way, that would somehow be even worse. Black eyes close off, shuttering the loss away from where she can see it, body language stiffening in preparation for retreat. 

The professional part that needs to go check up on his medical health is nudged very gently by the small part that is a friend, confidant, lover, that says  _ wait. _ “Good.” Violence isn’t the answer until it is, until it is the only way to defend themselves and the world they’ve sworn to protect and the people they love.  She won’t let him slink away to lick wounds in peace when she could do otherwise, when something under her sternum pulls her towards him. Drawing close, within easy reach, she extends her hands towards him in offering. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.” 

He’s closing off, hand on the doorknob, turning to go, as though his only intent had been to check in and demonstrate his continued stubborn existence. He’s professional, courteous when he wants to be, she can imagine him delivering this news to Torbjorn or Reinhardt in the same manner. She won’t let him get away that easily, not when they’ve found a way of letting professionalism lie parallel to emotional entanglements. Her hand catches his wrist and she closes the space between them with a guiding tug, locking her knees as his weight bears down on her and he folds around her, kevlar body armor rough and hard against her cheek. The embrace is precious, he’s alive and back with her and that’s so much more than she has any right to take for granted. Then it’s back to business, pulling away to really look at him as a patient, to not be blinded by relief. There’s a cut under his eyes, narrow and scabbed over, a faint bruise peaking out from under the collar of his vest. “None of your lies, Commander. What happened?”

Gabriel shrugs, one hand idle on her hip as he tugs his hat off and wads it into a pocket. “Just a scratch.”

“It’s always just a scratch with you.” Angela clicks her tongue and resists the urge to cup his cheek, pull him down to her level and never let him go. There’s a time and a place for those urges, in her lab, in the middle of a medical exam, is neither. Still, she smiles up at him and pats him on the shoulder as she extracts herself from his arms. “Best get it cleaned up quickish, then.”

The supplies are where she just stocked them and his eyes track her as she returns to his side and eases away the heavy gauntlet- men and their toys, honestly- and studies the gash that goes from his forearm and gouges deep in the crook of his arm. “Are you experience any problems moving it?” The bleeding has slowed, somehow he avoided nicking anything venous, so it’s enough to flush the wound, apply disinfectant, and wrap it up. Gambling, she pushes him just a little as she knots off the bandage around his bicep. “You don’t look fine. No one is expecting you to come out of this unscathed.”

He grunts at that, as close to acknowledgement as she can expect. “I’m not going to break, angel.” Angela frowns at the nickname as he tests her work, wiggling his fingers and bending the joint. She’s not sure she agrees with his assessment, but he speaks again, interrupting her thoughts.  His eyes are fixed on something invisible, a thousand yards away, he prods at the wound with his good hand, hissing a breath between his teeth. “Talon didn’t give a shit about all the effort we put towards protecting Amelie LaCroix. We knew she was their number one target, we did everything we could to protect her and they still got both of them in the end.” He lets out a long, ragged breath, “Shit, whatever they did, it changed her so fundamentally she wasn’t even herself at the end. How do you fight something like that?”

The raw vulnerability on display, grief edging towards despair, is enough to make her wish she was an angel, able to cradle him and everyone else suffering, under wings of grace and healing, or a god who could bring ruin to the evil that stalks them. Instead, she’s just a woman, so she grips his shoulder as tightly as she can. “You will find a way. That is what you do.”

His hand covers hers, squeezes hard enough to hurt and his eyes fall to the space yawning between them. “What if they get me first? Or Jack? Christ, what if LaCroix was just a trial run and this is just the start of a takeover?”

“Winston and I are doing all we can to figure out exactly what Talon did to her. Maybe there’s a way to reverse it or inoculate against it.” She can see the words flow in one ear and out the other without touching his consciousness, thoughts knotting in a desperate spiral. “Don’t lose the battle in your head, right? The situation is never hopeless.”

“What if they get you?” Black eyes snap on to her face, the unspoken fear fully realized. 

It draws her up short for an instant. Foolish, but she hasn’t thought about it. Perhaps peripherally she’s considered the risk, her possible death, but mind control? Those terrorists accessing her medical research and still unpublished experiments? Determined not to be rattled by the possibility, she taps his chest lightly. “I would be very disappointed if you could not protect yourself from me, especially now that you know the risk.”

“Gerard-”

“You are not Gerard and I am not your wife.” Wiggling her fingers out of his, she winds an arm around his neck and leans in. “We face them together, as equals. Locking me away in a lab is not an acceptable solution.”

His forehead rests against hers, hands tightening on her waist before forcing himself to release her and step away from her. “They’re not going to care about your marital status.”

Dealing with Reyes when he gets like this, when her commander, lover, friend, and perpetual pain in the ass tries to close himself off from her as though by emotionally cloistering himself off he could prevent whatever catastrophe looms large before them. “Then the damage is already done.” She responds crisply. “Ending this,” she waves vaguely at the imposed space between them, “won’t change anything. If I am a target, then I won’t stop being one simple because we stop being… us.” She fumbles for the words and then shrugs. “The line is crossed, whether you like it or not. I would prefer to enjoy the time we have, together, for as long as we can make it last.”

The idioms are butchered, but they seem to get the job done. Gabriel closes the gap between them again, getting back in her face, surrounding her with his presence and crushing her between his chest and the counter top digging into her back as his growl reverberates through her bones. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“Well then,” Angela manages a smile, glancing up from under her eyelashes. “I have nothing to worry about, ja?” The clock reads 5:17 in the morning and she doesn’t want to argue about this any longer. Stretching up, she tugs him down to meet her halfway and kisses him sweetly, warm and safe and alive. His breath hitches and she can see the pulse quicken in his neck. “Let's go to bed, Gabriel, there’s much to be done tomorrow.”

**Author's Note:**

> Trying to get back in the swing of posting regularly and feeling out characterizations for these two. Come follow me at [ tumblr ](http://ricca-raccoon.tumblr.com/)where I post pictures of cute things and talk about feelings and occasionally answer questions and such.


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